Pixel Theaterhttps://pixeltheater.wordpress.com
When video games are about more than high scores
Wed, 19 Dec 2018 07:26:10 +0000 en
hourly
1 http://wordpress.com/https://s0.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngPixel Theaterhttps://pixeltheater.wordpress.com
The Death of Single-Playerhttps://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/the-death-of-single-player/
https://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/the-death-of-single-player/#commentsFri, 16 Dec 2011 03:28:15 +0000http://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/?p=160Back in August, game consultant Mark Cerny made waves in the gaming community when he predicted the death of single-player within the next couple years.

Pictured: Game Consultant Mark Cerny

I hate to say it, but he may be right. Even a lot of series that began as single-player-only have added or will add multiplayer in later iterations. Dead Space, Assassin’s Creed, Bioshock, Dead Rising, Resident Evil… hell, even Mass Effect 3 will have a multiplayer component.

Whether it’s co-op or multiplayer, or something in between like in Demon’s Souls, inserting multiplayer anywhere and everywhere is the trend.

And it needs to stop.

Let me be clear, I am in no way saying that there should not be any multiplayer games. What I’m saying is that we shouldn’t eliminate the story-driven, single-player game because multiplayer is the “thing” now.

Yes, multiplayer games can have stories, but let’s be honest, even in co-op, people don’t pay attention to plot when they’re playing games with others. The same way you can’t have two people simultaneously reading the same copy of a book, you can’t expect gamers to be invested in a story when others are playing with them.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Multiplayer certainly can be fun – just ask the bazillion people who just bought Modern Warfare 3, causing its profits to pass the one billion dollar mark faster than Avatar. It’s just that the experience is fundamentally different, and we shouldn’t get rid of one in favor of the other.

I understand the motivation on the publishers’ part – a billion dollars, remember? – but just because one type of game sells better, it doesn’t mean they should only make one type of game. It would be like if romances made the most money of all movie genres, so Hollywood decided to only make romances.

Noooooooo!!!!

And the fact is that multiplayer games, since they often have no set endpoint, have more competition. If you make a military FPS focused on multiplayer, you’re immediately in competition with Modern Warfare. Which means you have to be better than Modern Warfare, or else quickly fade away. And if you make an MMORPG, the time investment and monthly fee means gamers would have to choose between it and World of Warcraft, which is a hard fight to win.

Story-driven, single-player games, on the other hand, can coexist peacefully. No one had to choose between playing Assassin’s Creed II and Alan Wake because they could easily play both to their respective conclusions.

Plus – and this is less of a dollars-and-cents argument – the people buying multiplayer-focused games are not necessarily the same people who buy single-player games. There’s a common logical fallacy that if 10 thousand people buy Game A and 5 thousand buy Game B, then those who bought Game B also bought Game A.

Again, I suppose it doesn’t matter on the bottom line, but then again, maybe it does. Atlus is a Japanese publisher known for releasing niche, mostly single-player titles in the U.S. Their games can’t even hope to breathe the same air as the Modern Warfares of the world in terms of sales charts, but that being said, they have a loyal fanbase and they cater to those fans’ desires. A bazillion people will not buy the next Shin Megami Tensei game, but I will.

Knowing that they have such loyal fans, they can print less copies, spend less on advertising, etc. It’s not an issue of their games being “better” or “worse” than the more popular multiplayer games, because they are two different products for two different audiences.

But, you may ask, if single-player games are simply adding multiplayer components without eliminating single-player, then why would that bother me? Everyone gets what they want, right?

Sadly, no.

Not only are developers forced to divide their resources, thereby giving less time and attention to the single-player aspect than they would otherwise, but often the multiplayer infringes upon the single-player campaign. Games built for co-op are great for multiplayer, but they force those playing alone to be stuck with an idiotic AI companion for the duration of the journey.

Not that I didn’t love watchinig Sheva unload all her ammo into the front of a boss instead of the back where it’s actually vulnerable, but it would’ve been nice if Resident Evil 5 didn’t stick you with her brain-dead ass if she wasn’t being controlled by another player.

I hate you.

And the fact is that this is increasinly becoming an expection. I feel like every other preview I read of Batman: Arkham City complained about how it wouldn’t have co-op. Even though everyone loved the first game, and the developers explained that they wanted to instead focus on creating the best single-player experience they could, people were still upset by the lack of multiplayer.

Which leads me to another logical fallacy, which is that the most vocal fans are a fair representation of all fans. It stands to reasons that the gamers posting on online message boards are more likely than those who don’t to prefer multiplayer games, yet developers still use online forums as sources for “what the fans want.”

My point is this: the gaming universe has grown exponentially since the days of Pong. It’s big enough to contain a wide variety of experiences for a wide variety of people. Want to play a hardcore online competitive deathmatch? Go for it. Want to play a motion-controlled casual game like Wii Sports? Sure. Want to beat your high score on Bejeweled? No problem.

And if I want more of the finely crafted interactive storytelling that I have shown this medium is capable of when it focuses on the single-player experience, then you know what? There should always be room for that, too.

Wait, bad example.

]]>https://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/the-death-of-single-player/feed/2pixeltheaterDr WilyLove Happens Movie PostershevaBad DudesFinal Fantasy VI (Part 2)https://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/final-fantasy-vi-part-2/
https://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/final-fantasy-vi-part-2/#respondFri, 16 Dec 2011 03:19:13 +0000http://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/?p=135This is part two of my look at some of Final Fantasy VI’s best scenes, which I could not do without mentioning (drumroll)… the opera scene. Never has Pixel Theater been more literal.

The Opera Scene:

Celes was a general in the Empire who was branded a traitor for speaking out against the poisoning of Doma Castle.

When the party needs transportation to the Empire, they are told that an eccentric gambler named Setzer owns an airship. Setzer can be a hard man to find, but he is enamored with a local opera singer named Maria and has vowed to kidnap her on the night of her big performance.

Because that’s how he rolls, that’s why.

As luck would have it, Celes looks just like Maria, and so the plan is for the former general to take her place. Now this military woman, who has no singing experience, must get in touch with her more delicate side to fill Maria’s shoes.

The player must memorize her lines and get them right during the performance.

Incidentally, the song (“Aria di Mezzo Carattere”) became very popular with fans of the series, and has been performed live in concert a number of times.

If the MIDI voice substitutes don’t do it for you, here’s a version with actual vocals dubbed in.

This scene is remarkable because, for one thing, it’s so unexpected. Even in an RPG, gameplay typically revolve around hitting things until they die, so to play through a fully realized opera scene was a bold move on the developer’s part. And it paid off, as the opera scene is treasured by fans to this day.

Celes’ Suicide:

Later in the game, right after Kefka turns the Floating Continent into the Rapidly Falling Continent and rearranges the entire world, Celes wakes up on a remote island. Her only companion is Cid, a scientist for the Empire and a father figure to Celes (or a grandfather figure; she calls him “Granddad”).

I still don’t know what the hell he’s wearing.

Of those who washed up on that island, they are the only survivors. For all they know, they’re the only people left alive period.

Soon after Celes wakes up, Cid falls ill, and you must catch fish to feed him. Catch healthy, fast-moving fish and you can nurse him back to health (a process that can take quite a while, actually). Catch poor-quality fish, however, and he dies.

Either way, Celes finds a raft and the game continues, but if you let him die, a very emotional scene plays out. In a shocking moment, especially for a mid-nineties game, Celes walks to the top of a cliff and jumps off.

(Note the instrumental version of her opera song in the background.)

Attempted suicide was not a topic you would expect to see in a game back then, and I suspect that Cid’s odd note (“…perked ’em right up!”) was added to appease the censors, or else Cid just has a dark sense of humor.

Of course, what happens next is contrived, but then again that would have been quite a bummer if the game had ended there. Celes survives the fall somehow, and a bird shows up at that exact moment with the bandana that belonged to Locke, Celes’ companion and possible love interest. This convinces her that others must be alive, and she sets out on a raft.

Don’t question it; just accept it.

Final Fantasy VI contains what I believe is one of the greatest gaming narratives of all time (I don’t have one definitive winner in that category because comparing, for example, this game to Silent Hill 2 is an apple-and-oranges scenario). Too often, in all forms of writing, characters are stereotypes, stock characters, or plot devices. FF6 manages to develop each of its cast members in a way that not only drives the plot but lets the audience relate to them and their human flaws.

]]>https://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/final-fantasy-vi-part-2/feed/0pixeltheaterFFVI_Blackjack_DeckCid_(Final_Fantasy_VI)Celes on beachFinal Fantasy VI (Part 1)https://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/final-fantasy-vi-part-1/
https://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/2011/12/15/final-fantasy-vi-part-1/#respondFri, 16 Dec 2011 03:13:57 +0000http://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/?p=133For a long time, especially during the 90s, if you were talking about compelling video game narratives, you were talking about Final Fantasy. The series pioneered the art of cinematic video game storytelling like nothing else. 1994’s Final Fantasy VI is, in my humble opinion (and I know some may disagree), the greatest of them all.

(If anyone’s wondering why the box says “III,” it’s because at the time, only two Final Fantasy games had been released in North America (the first one, which obviously had no number, and the fourth, which was called “II”). To maintain their American numbering continuity, the sixth entry was labeled “III” in the States. By the time Final Fantasy VII was released in 1997, the world of video games had become flat enough to the point where publishers could use the actual Japanese numbering and not confuse us Americans. Stateside re-releases of the fourth and sixth entries (on the Playstation, Nintendo DS, etc.) retained their actual numbers as well. Got it?)

I distinctly remember being a child and watching my older brother play Final Fantasy VI for the first time. As an inflamed Figaro Castle submerged into the desert sands to foil Kefka’s evil plot, I exclaimed, “It’s like a movie!”

What I meant, in my youthful enthusiasm, was that the storytelling, although still using text rather than spoken dialogue, had an ambitious cinematic flair that no game before it had been able to achieve.

What makes the sixth iteration particularly remarkable is that I cannot, off the top of my head, think of another RPG that features a genuine ensemble cast. As in, there is no one protagonist. Each of the game’s characters are so memorable and well-developed that it makes you roll your eyes whenever another game forces you to play as Generic Hero Guy.

Setting the Stage:

I’m breaking from format somewhat here, because the game’s plot is so epic and lengthy that trying to summarize it would take way too long and I still wouldn’t do it justice.

(Fun fact: despite its length, the entire game was translated from Japanese to English in 30 days… by one guy.)

The premise in a nutshell – a ragtag band of heroes unite to bring down an evil empire – may sound like everything ever made, including Star Wars, but there’s a lot more to it than that.

Likewise, for me to highlight only one scene would be like picking a favorite child, so I’ll present a number of them.

The Poisoning of Doma:

Kefka is evil the way Moby Dick is long. A general of the Empire, he looks like a court jester for some reason, which is actually kind of appropriate, since, like the Joker, he doesn’t really have a reason for being evil. He just is.

Even all zoomed-in and pixelated, he’s evil.

For example: at one point Kefka’s army has Doma Castle under siege. With the soldiers of Doma, including the king’s retainer Cyan, standing their ground, a frustrated Kefka opts for a different plan. Noticing that their encampment was up-river from Doma Castle, he orders his troops to poison the river, killing everyone in the castle – soldier and citizen alike – except for Cyan, who evidently doesn’t like to stay hydrated.

(Whoever played the game in this clip decided to walk around the castle at one point, so Cyan doesn’t exactly rush to check on his family. Just know that was the player’s choice, not the game’s.)

I know they’re just 16-bit sprites, but watching Cyan pull the body of his dead son out of bed is still a spine-shivering moment.

Understandably, Cyan then goes on a mad, sword-swinging rampage through the Empire’s camp, where he meets up with the player’s party and joins their crusade.

This scene is not only powerful in and of itself, but like virtually everything else in FF6, it’s character-based. Each character acts according to their personality and in ways that set up future events.

For example, you see that Kefka is evil and doesn’t care about killing innocents. Roughly halfway through the game, he more or less destroys the world, reshaping the entire landscape and using his tower base to arbitrary shoot magic beams at the world below.

Jerk.

Also, you learn that Cyan is stoic, putting his status as a soldier before his emotions (notice how he checks on the King before his own family). His inability to cope with the loss of his family is explored when he must ride the Phantom Train, the ghostly locomotive that takes the souls of the deceased to wherever it is they go.

Still beats taking the bus.

Cyan’s Love Letters:

Since character drives the story, this theme is continued later in the game. After Kefka reshapes the world and scatters the player’s party to all corners of it, the player finds Cyan living on a mountain. There, you discover that he has been writing love letters to the wife of a dead soldier, pretending to be her deceased beloved to spare her the pain of loss.

This plot point accomplishes a number of things. It shows Cyan not wanting someone else to suffer as he did, even if it is a lie, and it reveals that despite his stoicism, he does have an emotional side. Also, it makes you wonder: as he writes to this woman, is he thinking of all the things he never said to his wife?

When you arrive, he has already written a letter to the woman confessing what he has been doing, and he declares that he cannot continue to live in the past, showing his development as a character since the murder of his family.

The resolution of Cyan’s story arc comes in an optional side quest in which the player rests in the ruins of Doma Castle. There, a demon that feeds on sadness possesses Cyan, and he must overcome his grief to defeat it.

Suck it, grief!

See? I told you there was a lot going on in this game. More examples to come.

The other people James meets are a 19-year-old runaway named Angela, a chubby man named Eddie, and a little girl named Laura. Remember how I said Silent Hill is a reflection of one’s psyche? Case in point:

James is shocked that the eight-year-old Laura could survive in the monster-infested town. When he asks her, she is perplexed. “What monsters?” She doesn’t see any monsters because she is innocent.

The others? Not so much.

Through newspaper clippings and Angela’s dialogue, it is revealed that she was being sexually abused by her father, so she killed him and ran away.

Angela: So what do you want, then? Oh, I see… you’re trying to be nice to me, right? I know what you’re up to. It’s always the same. You’re only after one thing. / James: No, that’s not true at all. / Angela: You don’t have to lie. Go ahead and say it. Or you could just force me. Beat me up like he always did…”

The last time you see Angela, she is ascending a stairway that is engulfed in flames. You never know what happens to her, but it is apparent that she is still haunted by her past.

“You see it too? For me, it’s always like this.”

Eddie is a victim of bullying. Tired of being made fun of for his weight, he kills his bully’s dog and shoots him in the leg. Like Angela, he is running from his past.

Eddie: Do you know what it does to you, James? When you’re hated, picked on, spit on just ’cause of the way you look? After you’ve been laughed at your whole friggin’ life? That’s why I ran away after I killed the dog. Ran away like a scared little girl. […] Then he came after me. I shot him, too. Right in the leg! He cried more than the dog! He’s gonna have a hard time playing football on what’s left of that knee.”

At one point, James enters a room full of fresh human corpses, and then confronts a gun-wielding Eddie, who contends that he had just killed some “monsters.” In Silent Hill, what James sees as people Eddie perceives as “monsters” because of his history of being bullied. Whether he sees actual monsters or is simply editorializing is up to the player’s interpretation.

The climax of the game, however, occurs when James finally reaches the hotel room where he and Mary had stayed. There, he plays a videotape, and… well, I’ll let you watch.

What begins as their vacation video turns into footage of something that wasn’t recorded: James euthanizes Mary, smothering her with a pillow to end her suffering. While it was in accordance with her wishes, he still feels guilty, perhaps because part of him wanted to be free of having to tend to her constantly (James: It was a long three years… I was… tired), hence the state of his personal Silent Hill.

At one point in the game James goes through the Silent Hill Historical Society building, where you can see a painting of the town’s executioners back in its witch-hunting days. The executioners look just like our friend Pyramid Head.

Others have noted that of all the enemies in the game with a discernable gender, all are female except for him. This is because Pyramid Head – the executioner – represents James, or at least the way he views himself. That’s why he kills Maria over and over again, because it represents the event that James is tortured by. Late in the game, James can even wield Pyramid Head’s trademark giant sword, driving the point home.

Most games would have stopped there, but Silent Hill 2 goes even further into James’ tortured psyche. In addition to guilt for what he did, James also feels guilt for his sexual frustration that came as a result of having a sickly wife for a number of years. Maria is the manifestation of this, a sexualized version of Mary.

Continuing the theme, those female enemies I mentioned include mannequins and cleavage-bearing nurses:

Maybe if I squint...

Using sexual themes for the purpose of horror is certainly not new; vampire stories have been doing it since the 19th Century. But sadly, in video games sexuality is rarely handled as a mature topic.

"Who, me?"

In fact, the word “mature” has almost come to be a euphemism for mindless sex and violence.

Silent Hill 2 is remarkable for tackling actual mature themes in a thoughtful way while still remaining uncompromising and provocative. A decade later it still has a rabid following for just that reason. Click here or here to read what others have to say, and see that I’m definitely not alone in praising this game’s story.

Look, I enjoy straight-up action as much as the next guy, but games like Silent Hill 2 prove that the video game medium is capable of so much more.

I’m not ashamed to admit it: horror games scare the crap out of me. And yet I love them, and none more so than the Silent Hill series.

When Resident Evil was released in 1996, it ushered in a new era of “survival horror” games. Technology had finally reached the point where a game could be truly immersive and scary.

Well, not that scary.

Three years later, Silent Hill was released on the Playstation, and while both series were lumped into the horror genre, they each had a distinctive way of eliciting scares. RE relied more on surprising the player, such as the infamous hallway early in the first game in which a Cerberus (the game’s zombie hounds) bursts through a window without warning.

Ahh!!

Silent Hill, conversely, creates atmospheric, psychological horror – a lingering feeling of creeping dread that pervades the entire game. Sometimes you wish something would jump out at you just to break the tension.

Let me put it this way: many games have some sort of disclaimer at the beginning, warning the player that they contain violence, sex, foul language, etc. Silent Hill 2 bears the following (refreshingly blunt) disclaimer: “There are violent and disturbing images in this game.”

The fact that they specifically warn about disturbing images says a lot. I wouldn’t categorize Silent Hill games as excessively gory, considering that they are horror games, but they are certainly disturbing, and in a more subtle way than the ol’ dog-through-the-window gag.

This difference extends to the player-characters as well. In Resident Evil you play as a badass special ops agent and wield a Rambo-like arsenal including machine guns and grenade launchers. In Silent Hill, on the other hand, you play as an everyman who gets winded if he (or she) runs for too long.

Running is hard, I know.

I consider Silent Hill 2 (released for the PS2 in 2001) to not only be the best in the series, but one of the best video game narratives of all time. The series is known for having deeply symbolic plots that rely more on player interpretation than anything else.

And there’s a whole hell of a lot to interpret. Check out the plot analyses over at GameFAQs. In particular, note user SilentPyramid’s document, which analyzes the first four games in the series and is 213 PAGES LONG. Dude could have written a doctoral thesis with less time and effort.

I’ll try to be concise here, but the point is that there’s a lot going on here, and I can’t hope to do it justice the way others have.

(Warning: Spoilers!)

Setting the Stage:

Silent Hill is a fictional town in the Northeastern US. It was evidently a popular tourist destination until a cult turned it into a fog-shrouded hell. Periodically it will alternative between the “normal” Silent Hill – which is scary enough – and the “Other World,” a nightmarish industrial hellscape.

The town is also now a reflection of a person’s soul, where any guilt, shame, or hatred they hold on to will become manifest. In other words, Silent Hill appears different to different people.

As Silent Hill 2 begins, James Sunderland is just arriving at the eponymous town, having received a letter from his wife Mary instructing him to meet her at their “special place,” which he presumes to be the Lakeside Hotel in Silent Hill, where they once vacationed.

Wait, did I mention that Mary had died of an illness three years earlier? That’s probably important to note.

So James ventures through the mostly abandoned town. On his way he meets a few curious characters, most notably a woman named Maria who is physically identical to Mary, but her dress and mannerisms are noticably more provocative. At one point James and Maria must pass through an abandoned… gentlemen’s club… to which Maria inexplicably has the key.

Hey there.

Among the monsters that plague James throughout his journey is Pyramid Head, who has oddly become a sort of unofficial mascot for the series. According to Konami, his name is technically “Red Pyramid,” but since that name is never said within the game and he has a pyramid for a head, people just call him Pyramid Head.

Look who brought a knife to a gun fight.

The Scenes:

Pyramid Head kills Maria. Then he kills her again. And again. Each time Maria reappears later on with no explanation for the whole coming-back-to-life thing. Keep this in mind for later.

2005’s Shadow of the Colossus for the PS2 is, if you’ll remember, one of the games being honored by the Smithsonian as a work of art, and with good reason.

Yes, its minimalist design may make for an odd elevator pitch; for one thing, the game consists of 16 boss fights. That’s it. No dungeons. No lesser enemies. No items to collect or equipment to… um, equip. Just you, a horse, and 16 colossi to slay.

"I'm gonna need a bigger horse."

On paper, that might seem like a flimsy excuse for a game, especially in a gaming world filled with content-rich titles like the recent Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. However, anyone who’s played Shadow of the Colossus knows that it’s an amazing experience and proof that quality trumps quantity.

The graphics are gorgeous (granted, it came out in 2005, but I think even today they still hold up) and the plot, like in Braid, provides another example of how in modern games, protagonists are becoming more nuanced and morally complex. It’s getting increasingly difficuly to tell who’s “good” and who’s “evil.”

Although sometimes it's still pretty clear.

Setting the Stage:

The player controls a boy named Wander, who steals a magical sword and travels to a mysterious shrine in a forbidden land to resurrect his beloved, Mono. There, the booming voice of some entity tells him that to bring Mono back to life, Wander must find and kill sixteen colossi, gigantic creatures that roam the surrounding wilderness.

Despite an ominous warning that “the price you pay may be heavy indeed,” he proceeds to do as instructed.

As he systematically hunts down and exterminates the colossi, the player may begin to question these actions. Sure, the colossi are big and scary, but as far as Wander knows, they never actually did anything to warrant execution. They only attack Wander when he ventures into their territory, and in some cases only after he attacks them first.

Dude, not cool.

Contributing to this doubt is the fact that, as each colossus falls, Wander appears increasingly pale, and a pair of horns begin sprouting out of his head. You would think that might be a red flag to re-evaluate your life choices, but Wander continues on with his colossi killing spree.

(Spoilers ahead!)

The Scene:

In the end, he does indeed pay a heavy price. The mysterious entity Wander had been serving is in fact an evil deity who was sealed away, his being severed into sixteen parts. Somebody smarter than me noticed that the entity’s name, “Dormin,” is “Nimrod” spelled backwards, and Nimrod is a Biblical king whose body was also cut into pieces and spread throughout the land.

So although Dormin does honor his word and bring Mono back to life, the fact is that Wander unknowingly resurrects what would perhaps be known as Satan in Western theology. As if that wasn’t enough to qualify as a “bad day,” Dormin possesses Wander, turning him into a giant creature akin to the ones he killed.

Throughout the game, the player is made aware that a group of knights (the ones he stole the sword from) are in pursuit of Wander. They know what he’s up to, and want to stop him from using the “forbidden spell.” They catch up with him just a bit too late. Wander had just killed the final colossus.

(This isn’t the full ending, but it’s the meat of it and if you want, you can see part 2 here. Oh, and no, you’re not going insane; characters in the game speak a fictional language.)

The story in Shadow of the Colossus is remarkable because of its complex morality. As you, the player, question the ethics of hunting down creatures at the behest of a mysterious voice, you realize that Wander may be having the same doubts. However, he continues nonetheless, and in the end he unleashes a demon who may have destroyed the world if not for timely intervention.

You can’t just call him “evil,” though, since his motivation is noble: love. He simply wants to bring the girl he loves back to life, and while this is an extreme case in a fantasy setting, the feeling that you would do anything to make that happen is a very relateable one.

Certainly not every game protagonist nowadays is so morally complex, but I think it’s a positive step that the medium has matured to where plots and character motivations are things that can be discussed and debated. Shadow of the Colossus is a shining example of this, as Wander is certainly closer to Doctor Faustus than, say, Sonic the Hedgehog.

It used to be that when you were playing a game, you could be fairly certain that your avatar’s quest was a noble one. You were the “good guy” out to vanguish the “bad guys,” which of course you did and then everyone high-fived and watched the credits roll.

In the modern era of gaming, however, developers are increasingly moving away from such simplistic plots. Protagonists can be flawed or misguided (and if you’re playing a choice-driven game like Fable or Mass Effect, they can be baby seal-clubbingly evil, too). Narratives are becoming more complex, so naturally protagonists are following suit.

Braid is an independent downloadable game first released on XBox Live Arcade in 2008. In many ways, it’s an homage to the 2D platformers of the 8- and 16-bit eras, in particular the first Super Mario Brothers for the NES, the game that created the platformer as we know it.

Oh, I see what you did there.

But once you reach Braid’s final level, you realize it’s also a modern deconstruction of video game tropes.

Setting the Stage:

The heart of Braid’s gameplay is its time-manipulation mechanics. Like a typical sidescroller, you run, jump, and climb to collect puzzle pieces and finish the level, but you also have the ability to rewind time. Among other things, this allows you to fix any mistakes you make, such as falling into a pit. If you’ve played the modern Prince of Persia games, you’re familiar with the concept.

Some of the stages contain their own time-related quirk. For example, in one you can “record” a shadow of yourself that repeats your last action, effectively allowing you to do two things at once. Particularly brilliant is the stage in which the flow of time is linked to your place on the x-axis. Move right, and time goes forward. Move left, and it goes backwards (and in a neat touch, so does the music). Since the y-axis is unaffected, thinking about your up-and-down movement is the key to success.

Also important: dressing snazzy.

Plotwise, the game appears at first to be quite straight-forward: you play Tim, who is on a quest to reach his beloved princess. Simple. Sure, the first stage is mysterously labeled “World 2,” but surely that doesn’t mean anything, right?

The Scene:

Tim has finally reached the last stage, oddly called World 1. His goal is to save the princess from a big, burly knight (looking awfully Donkey Kong-ish by design) who boasts “I’ve got you!”. Jumping out of her captor’s arms, the princess shouts “Help!” and she and Tim, who are on different horizontal planes, dash towards the right of the screen, where the paths intersect and they can finally be together. As Tim makes it to the porch outside the princess’ room, the only option the player has is to press the button that rewinds time, and the scene plays in reverse… or does it?

(The scene ends around 4:35 of the clip, although if you watch till the end you see another Mario reference, with the flag-raising and the castle.)

Slowly, you realize that the event played backwards tells a different tale, a darker tale, one suited for 2008 rather than 1985. Those switches the two were hitting to help each other progress? Now they’re trying to stop each other, with the other escaping just in time. And now, the princess approaches the knight, shouts “Help!” and jumps into his arms. He declares “I’ve got you!” and the two ascend the rope they descended from the first time.

So it turns out your perception of time was reversed (notice how the first time, the cannonballs go back into the cannon, and the chandelier puts itself back together). Tim wasn’t saving the princess from the knight, the knight was saving her from Tim, who evidently had been leering outside her window like a creepy stalker. In short, the bad guy is you.

This scene blew my mind the first time I saw it. As a lifelong gamer, it’s not often that I’m taken off-guard, but I genuinely didn’t see this twist coming. I also appreciate that the game doesn’t beat you over the head with it, but rather lets the player piece the truth together on their own. In fact, creator Jonathan Blow has stated that he designed the game to be open to interpretation. (As you may have deduced from some of the “books” Tim read in the clip, one of these is that the game is about the creation of the atomic bomb.)

Also, as I’ve been alluding to, this scene turns the standard Mario formula on its head. For one thing, it gives the damsel-in-distress a much more active role, asking “What if the princess doesn’t love you back?”. For another, I off-handedly mentioned in my Bioshock entry that we’ve been trained since that first Mario platformer to run to the right of the screen, because that’s where the goal is. With the exception of multi-level stages, that rule has generally held true for 2D games. Braid plays with this convention by making the “true” scene the one in which you run… left.

]]>https://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/braid-saving-the-princess/feed/0pixeltheaterBraidlogoBraid-Mario referenceTim from BraidChrono Trigger: Saving Larahttps://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/chrono-trigger-saving-lara/
https://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/chrono-trigger-saving-lara/#commentsThu, 17 Nov 2011 22:45:00 +0000http://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/?p=55Putting the “pixel” back in “Pixel Theater,” today I’ll look at the Super Nintendo RPG Chrono Trigger, released in 1995. I played this game as a kid back then, and it holds a special place in my heart. Of course, I’m not the only one. With its memorable plot, fantastic musical score, solid gameplay, and impressive (for the time) graphics, Chrono Trigger’s popularity remains even two decades later.

Setting the Stage:

Chrono Trigger, as you could probably guess, revolves around time travel. Usually that’s a recipe for a confusing, muddled narrative, but in this case it works. The game centers around Crono (I still don’t know whether this misspelling was intentional or simply a result of the game only allowing five characters for names).

Along with his companions, including childhood friends Marle and Lucca as well as an anthropomorphic frog (actually a knight under a curse), a robot, and a cavewoman, Crono adventures through time and space to prevent a giant parasitic creature named Lavos from destroying the planet.

Why the destroyer of worlds looks like some sort of crustacean, I don’t know.

The extensive plot is remarkably written and contains countless dramatic moments, including when Crono and friends first travel to the future. There they find a dystopian ruin where what little population remains is dying off and food (as well as hope) is scarce. This, they discover, is what will happen if they don’t put a stop to Lavos in earlier eras.

The Scene:

With the fate of the world on the line, it may seem odd for me to select a relatively small moment to focus on. But I’ve found that sometimes the smaller scenes can be more poignant, perhaps because fighting against planet-destroying creatures may not be all that relatable, while wanting your handicapped mother to walk again is. In fact, this scene resonated with fans so much, it was referenced in the game’s pseudo-sequel, Chrono Cross.

Crono’s friend Lucca, like her father before her, is a scientist (in fact, she was the one who initially invented the time machine, albeit by accident). When she was a child, her mother suffered a terrible accident involving one of her husband’s machine, which cost her the use of her legs.

Sadly, Fountains of Wayne never wrote a song called “Lucca’s Mom.”

After being asked if there is a moment in the past she would like to change, Lucca sneaks off from the rest of the group, entering a time portal that takes her to the time of her mother’s accident. There, Lucca finds a note from her father Taban indicating that the password to stop the machine is his wife’s name.

Only the craftiest of players (or those who looked it up) figured out that the name “Lara” could be entered using the SNES controller’s Left trigger, A button, and Right trigger. Failing to do so did not end the game; it simply meant that the past was not changed.

Check it out (the scene proper begins at roughly 3:30 in this clip, but the stuff before it is good too, as you see the chair-bound Lara and also witness Robo sacrificing 400 years to regrow a forest single-handedly, another great moment):

Again, part of what makes this scene remarkable is how it makes the player emotionally invested even though the stakes are relatively low. Typically in games everything is a matter of life and death, but here the issue at hand is whether or not a character’s mother can walk. She lives either way.

In gameplay terms, success or failure made little difference; stopping the machine simply granted you an item and allowed you to see Lara walking around in the present if you so wished. But I believe the narrative is structured in such a way that you truly care about Lucca and her mother, fictional though they may be.

]]>https://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/chrono-trigger-saving-lara/feed/4pixeltheaterChrono-Trigger-Cover-ArtlavosluccasmomBioshock: “Would You Kindly?”https://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/bioshock-would-you-kindly/
https://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/bioshock-would-you-kindly/#respondThu, 17 Nov 2011 03:09:05 +0000http://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/?p=29Since I briefly mentioned it in my last post, I figure I might as well look at the 2007 game Bioshock and its most memorable moment. (Warning: Spoilers ahead!)

Setting the Stage:

Bioshock takes place in 1960. The protagonist, Jack, is on a plane that goes down in the Atlantic, but survives and discovers an underwater city called Rapture. Built by wealthy industrialist Andrew Ryan in 1946, Rapture was meant to be a self-contained society based on the ideals of Objectivism, a philosophy created by Ayn Rand, an author best known for Atlas Shruggedand The Fountainhead.

No, I won’t try to summarize Objectivism here, since it would take too long and I’d probably screw it up anyways. Suffice to say, Rapture is populated by the self-described “elite” who wish to escape the restraints that they believe society places upon them.

As you might expect, it didn’t exactly work out.

Building these probably wasn't such a great idea, either.

By the time you get there, Rapture is a blood-stained art deco ruin populated mostly by monsters created when science is left unchecked by morality.

Oh, and this. Man, the TSA is out of control.

As Jack, you are constantly in touch via radio with a man named Atlas (in case the Ayn Rand connection was too subtle otherwise), who tells you that you must find and eliminate Ryan.

The Scene:

After a long journey through Rapture, Jack finally gets to Ryan’s office, where this happens (I should warn you, it gets pretty graphic):

It turns out that Jack is the illegitimate son of Ryan and a prostitute, and “Atlas” is in fact the thought-dead Frank Fontaine, Ryan’s rival. What seemed to be an innocuous verbal crutch in his (fake) Irish brogue turns out to be a trigger phrase Jack was genetically engineered to obey.

“Would you kindly…”

As for why Ryan would allow himself to be killed, I’m not entirely sure. My guess would be that he saw the writing on the wall, knew Rapture was a failed experiment, and wished to die by reinforcing his original point: “A man chooses, a slave obeys.”

What strikes me the most about this scene is that it plays off of the very idea of control in a video game. In a game, you do things because that’s how you progress. Ever since the days of Mario on the NES, we learned to run right because that’s where your goal is.

But why does the character do things? The “Would you kindly?” reveal blew people’s minds because it radically changed your view of the game up until that point. Jack was doing things because he had no choice; Atlas’ verbal cues forced him to obey.

It’s common in games for a secondary character to instruct you on what to do next. Developers have been using this technique for ages because it tells the player how to progress without breaking the fiction; you are instructed as your avatar is instructed. By turning this standard gameplay device into something sinister, Bioshock not only keeps gamers on their toes, but also adds a new layer to the typical gaming narrative.

]]>https://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/bioshock-would-you-kindly/feed/0pixeltheaterwould you kindlybig daddyNeptune's_Bounty_Smuggler_HangingGames without gaming?https://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/games-without-gaming/
https://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/games-without-gaming/#commentsThu, 10 Nov 2011 01:56:12 +0000http://pixeltheater.wordpress.com/?p=21In regards to the Smithsonian video game exhibit I referenced in my first post, reading about it makes me wonder if there isn’t a fatal flaw in the idea of presenting games in such a way. As the curators themselves explain:

Video games use images, actions, and player participation to tell stories and engage their audiences. In the same way as film, animation, and performance, they can be considered a compelling and influential form of narrative art. New technologies have allowed designers to create increasingly interactive and sophisticated game environments while staying grounded in traditional game types.

Clearly, they understand that the interactivity is a crucial component to what makes games a unique artistic medium. However, in an interview in the July 2011 issue of OXM, they noted that they couldn’t logistically have visitors playing through all of the featured games. (Unfortunately, I can’t find a link online to that article – curse you, print media!)

So they settled on this:

The exhibition will feature eighty games through still images and video footage. Five games will be available for visitors to play for a few minutes, to gain some feel for the interactivity—Pac-Man, Super Mario Brothers, The Secret of Monkey Island, Myst, and Flower. In addition, the galleries will include video interviews with developers and artists, large prints of in-game screen shots, and historic game consoles.

Which begs the question: is that experience analogous to actually playing the game? Do game clips and images still hold the same meaning out of context? If you haven’t played through a game’s (often lengthy) quest, would viewing a late-game scene still hold the same resonance? I hope so, for the sake of this blog if nothing else.

Paintings in a museum are displayed as the artist painted them, and music, novels, plays, etc. are all experienced as written (generally speaking). So while the audiences’ interpretations may differ, the medium itself is not distorted in the act of presenting it, unlike with video games.

It’s an intriguing dilemma, and I admit that while the Smithsonian’s solution may not be perfect, it’s the best we’ve got. A brief snippet of a fifty-hour RPG may not encapsulate the entire piece, and maybe the “Would you kindly?” reveal in Bioshock isn’t the same if you haven’t ventured through the ruins of Rapture. But for non-gamers to be able to view the arts of games, I guess it’s all we can do, and it’s certainly better than nothing.